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clay jonathan is drawing some comicsSat, 14 Oct 2017 22:53:35 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.555525749depression comix #332https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-332/
https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-332/#respondThu, 06 Jul 2017 21:05:07 +0000https://www.claycomix.com/?p=20706No matter what happens — whether it be success or failure, luck or bad fortune, nothing can shake that awful feeling about yourself. Bad things are deserved, good things are explained away thanks to impostor syndrome. It’s like a filter that only allows the awful things to be internalized while letting the good things seem like temporary distractions.

It’s taken me a while and I’ve been a little better about trying to own my successes but it’s been difficult. It’s very easy to make failure seem like a personality characteristic while letting successes feel like temporary aberrations. This is important to try to get over because it does lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy where failure is accepted and becomes the norm while chipping away at the ambition and motivation to aim for greater things.

]]>https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-332/feed/020706depression comix #331https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-331/
https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-331/#respondTue, 06 Jun 2017 05:43:07 +0000https://www.claycomix.com/?p=14982I had this idea for a comic in my sketchbook for several years, but it wasn’t focused enough and I never ended up drawing it. I knew it was something important, because we end up ascribing negative attributes because of race when the race is not our own but when the race is our own we tend to make the perpetrator a “special case”. Hence, white perpetrators of violence are often described in the media as having a troubled past, a lone wolf, or something else that isolates the person but is not indicative of being white. Perpetrators of other races do not get this treatment so much. It’s bad because it shows our racism for one, and it also shows how quickly we jump to mental illness as a reason people do bad things. In this way, we demonise both other races and those with mental illness at the same time.

I got some hate for this, and a number of arguments on Facebook as well. I knew it was coming. Strangely, I got very little hate from Tumblr, where I have the largest number of followers by far.

This week, we got to see this strip in action. More anti-Muslim rhetoric. But a white nationalist who killed two people didn’t get the terrorist label, with the media instead focusing on his previous abnormal behaviour than his racist beliefs. And when Kathy Griffin did a rather tasteless photo shoot with a bloody Trump mask, Melania Trump tried to pin Kathy’s behavior on mental illness — “a photo opportunity like this is simply wrong and makes you wonder about the mental health of the person who did it,” furthering the stigma against people suffering from mental illness.

In this strip, this is a new character, although I don’t know if he’ll show up again. He was fun to draw because I was trying to draw him in a more American way than my other characters.

]]>https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-331/feed/014982depression comix #330https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-330/
https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-330/#respondTue, 06 Jun 2017 05:16:59 +0000https://www.claycomix.com/?p=14976This is going back to a riff on how appearance matters too much in forming people’s view of suffering. If you appearance is good you can’t be suffering, but if it’s not you’re not trying hard enough, and none of this really helps the underlying illness. I’ve done similar strips before, but I think this one says it the most directly and efficiently. Sometimes this comic feels a bit repetitive, and a lot of that has to do with me finding a better way of saying something than I did before. This is one of those times I believe. But instead of using the same character as I have for previous strips on appearance vs. therapy, I changed it to this character, because she has a more interesting dynamic and appears more natural in both situations. It was fun to draw the differences between the two panels.

]]>https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-330/feed/014976depression comix #329https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-329/
https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-329/#respondTue, 23 May 2017 06:34:27 +0000https://www.claycomix.com/?p=11661This was probably not the best strip to put out before Valentine’s Day, but there are going to be a lot of people suffering because it’s Valentine’s Day and you’re supposed to be with someone. What if you think with your illness you shouldn’t be with anyone?

It kind of freaks people out when you talk along these lines. Depression can rob you of interest in meeting people, doing the mating dance, putting the necessary effort into a relationship … and in the back of your mind, you feel that in your condition it wouldn’t work anyways, a combination of knowing yourself and past experience. Explaining this to other people, they can’t figure it out. (Then they’ll turn around and give the “You can’t love someone else until you love yourself speech” as if they’ve figured out the magic ingredient in your lack of love life).

What it comes right down to is this: depression can make you a difficult person to love and make it difficult to love. It’s not impossible, but it takes a lot more patience, a lot more work, and an understanding of what makes depressed people do and think as they do.

And let’s not forget how amazingly awful it feels when things fall apart. Relationships that dissolve are no fun for anyone, but when you suffer from depression, it can hurt a lot worse, and the aftereffects last a long time. Getting involved can seem like a gamble, one that may just not be worth it.

However, research does say that relationships provide support and motivation. But as a sufferer, you know that it’s not right to get involved for those self-serving reasons. You’re going through hell, and you don’t want to take anyone along to benefit yourself.

There is no good answer to this one, maybe.

You can read the comic here -> https://www.depressioncomix.com/posts/329/

]]>https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-329/feed/011661depression comix #328https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-328/
https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-328/#commentsWed, 26 Apr 2017 07:00:11 +0000https://www.claycomix.com/?p=8958Music has helped me deal with a lot of problems in my life. I listen to what a lot of people call “depressing” music, but that so-called “depressing” music is often a similar voice that I can relate to during those times. The singer feels the same way I do. I’m not alone.

For this strip, I wanted to do something different. I added an extra “fifth” panel which I did a year before. I like these fifth panels because they allow me to stretch out a bit and draw a panel on a single piece of paper, and add a little depth to the story. I liked the image of these two singing together, two friends sharing their pain in a positive way. It took a few sketches to get it right, and a few tries to get which Leonard Cohen lyric to use, but it came out OK (I first used lyrics from “Chelsea Hotel #2” – “We are ugly but we have the music.”, which is what apparently Janis Joplin said to Leonard Cohen, but didn’t work without context so I switched to lyrics from “Joan of Arc”)

Another idea I had was a playlist with which readers could vote to make a playlist of depressing music that they liked. When this went live, I realized that readers could not enter their own songs to vote on, making it kind of useless. So for the first hour of the comic strip going up, I scrambled to find a replacement, which I did — Spotify. This ended up being a better idea because readers could actually listen to the songs people suggest, and it would be a comminity thing. Unfortunately, with some solutions, more problems pop up — I had to enter the songs into Spotify manually, and many songs were not licensed for use in Japan, and people ended up sending me long lists. It took me a long time to search for and enter all the songs, and people are STILL sending me suggestions though I closed that off long ago.

It was a great thing to do for the comic, and something that made the one comic a little more special. I should do these kind of things more often, they really add to the experience of reading all these monochromatic comics.

]]>https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-328/feed/18958depression comix #327https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-327/
https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-327/#respondWed, 26 Apr 2017 06:42:43 +0000https://www.claycomix.com/?p=8953This strip is about panic attacks. It was on my to-do list for a very long time, but I was never sure about how to go about doing it. A few weeks before doing this, I received a mail on tumblr asking me for such a strip, and I thought it was time to set myself to work on trying to depict it.

I’ve had a couple of panic attacks, and I can tell you they are terrifying experiences. I don’t think I can properly communicate the terror in a comic, but I can try. My first one happened over twenty years ago and I can still remember those feelings, as well as afterwards when I had my breathing back to normal and I was moving, but it took me a long time to talk after that. I don’t know how it compares to PTSD but panic attacks do mess you up.

I’m hoping this comic will start some conversation about panic attacks. I am still weary of them and it took me a long time to get over the circumstances that brought them about.

I’ll do more strips on this in the future if I can find a way to say something new about it. But like bipolar (which I still haven’t gotten around to doing) it’s really difficult to do strips about something like this in the confined space of 4 panels. But it’s worth doing and I hope to make a comic about the subject that is worth the time.

]]>https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-327/feed/08953depression comix #326https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-326/
https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-326/#respondFri, 14 Apr 2017 00:19:36 +0000https://www.claycomix.com/?p=8362This week’s strip is about bullying. It’s amazing how people, through the miracle of cognitive dissonance, conveniently forget the horrible things they’ve said or done or see them in a way that highlights a perceived weakness of the victim. And if you’re the victim, who had been in these threatening situations loathing every moment of it, who suffered through it all, there is simply no justice in it. We live in an era where you can deny your own faults and actions, dismiss them as jokes or locker room talk.

Regardless, these things can cause real and long-lasting harm. They cause victims to live a life that has a baseline level of paranoia, a lack of trust, and an active avoidance of situations that remind them of the original event. What makes this even worse is the denial of cupability when these things are brought up. They try to gaslight the victim by making those past frightening events into something less threatening, and then blame the victim for exaggerating the situation. This is a double-victimization.

All of this applies especially so to survivors of sexual assault. Originally the strip was going to be specifically about that but in the writing stage the dialogue got more generalized so it became about bullying in general. That’s why this particular character appears in the strip, but I still want to talk about the connections between sexual assault and mental health in future strips.

]]>https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-326/feed/08362depression comix #325https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-325/
https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-325/#commentsThu, 13 Apr 2017 00:44:01 +0000https://www.claycomix.com/?p=8308This is what it was like for me nearly every day back when I was doing Sexy Losers from 2003 on. Despite having thousands of readers at the time there was no way to convince me that what I was doing was any good, and all the jokes I had I came to believe were just not funny enough to commit to paper. Even though I was still generating ideas here and there, I was always thinking to myself they weren’t worth doing, no one will laugh and I’m just continuing a big joke that was on me. Soon I wasn’t even bothering to generate ideas, because what was the point. Everything I did sucked, and the only thing I was doing by continuing was proving to the world that I indeed sucked.

These feelings of inadequacy still haunt me and I was feeling it a lot late last year. Although I’m not making jokes like I used to, I still get the feeling that no one understands and that I’m missing the point when I do particular strips or that I’m saying something terribly wrong and offensive. Depression undercuts your confidence in your ideas and work and convinces you that they’re no good.

Maybe for some people these awful feelings that come with depression help them be more creative. It’s definitely something that doesn’t happen with me. Depression makes me too critical with myself and what I do to even let me begin a lot of the time.

Now that I do depression comix, it is a bit easier for me to generate new stuff because I don’t have to worry about being funny, just be on topic. That goal is a lot easier to reach than to have to think about how to make a joke funny enough to minimize “that wasn’t funny” remarks. Critics of humour can be quite harsh and that’s one of the reasons why Sexy Losers has stalled so much.

]]>https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-325/feed/18308depression comix #324https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-324/
https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-324/#respondThu, 13 Apr 2017 00:43:23 +0000https://www.claycomix.com/?p=8312This strip was inspired by a question I get occasionally about the first characters in the strip eventually getting together. That was never a plan; I doubt with her inability to understand depression coupled with his inability to “get over it” that any romantic spark would flourish, and if it did, it would probably not last long. I believe this is what she feels, that if she says the correct string of words he’ll wake up. And we of course, know this isn’t going happen.

There’s also the idea that depression isn’t normal, which, to be fair, isn’t the norm. But to the sufferer, who has had depression creep up on them over a long time and take over most of the facilities, it does feel like their own version of normal. It’s normal to wake up dreading the day. It’s normal to spend the day with thoughts of despair. It’s normal to spend the night wishing you weren’t alive to feel this way. There is nothing to snap out of, this is The New Normal. For those that don’t suffer this is difficult to grasp, that you life can fundamentally change in a way and still seem superficially the same. What goes on in your head and body is different, even though we’re still similar in our routines and appearance.

]]>https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-324/feed/08312depression comix #323https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-323/
https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-323/#respondWed, 15 Mar 2017 00:17:25 +0000https://www.claycomix.com/?p=7423This was the last strip of 2016. Given the global mood it didn’t really warrant one of those positive feel happy strips but more of a grumble. Not every year can be a good year, and sometimes we have to slog it out through the miserable ones. But the good news is we did make it another year, and I’m glad to be doing these comics, and I’m especially glad that people are still reading them.

This one was a tricky one to do because I didn’t want to be particularly hopeful with this one. Usually with these kinds of comics it’s appropriate to show some kind of optimism for the new year but I couldn’t do it. Instead, I chose a guarded optimism, a “well, at least we made it” message 2rather than “maybe next year will be better.” Because I’m, writing this in March, it’s easy to look back and see, yeah, any optimism would have been unfounded and naive.

I had to go back to the previous year’s strip and make sure that they are wearing the same thing in the drawing at the bottom, including the Gryffindor scarf (although they aren’t sharing it this time). Sometimes I forget about continuity and I drew Robin wearing a different scarf by mistake.

]]>https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-323/feed/07423depression comix #322https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-322/
https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-322/#respondWed, 15 Mar 2017 00:04:34 +0000https://www.claycomix.com/?p=7418Uggh. Christmas. I’m fortunate enough to be in Japan so I don’t feel the Christmas pressure as I did in the past, but reading my feeds from friends and random people on the internet it hasn’t gone away in my absence. I made the mistake of going back to Canada in the winter about five years ago and never again. It’s a great source of stress for everyone involved and this strip only touches on it.

These strips are fun to draw and I’d rather be doing these than two person conversation strips which are the foundation of this comic. It’s also fun to draw characters that may only appear in one panel ever, for example, the aunt in the third panel is based on Voldemort and his embrace of Malfoy in the final Harry Potter movie. I also made sure to put in the ignorant dig at Robin’s orientation that a lot of people have to deal with during relative visiting season.

]]>https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-322/feed/07418depression comix #321https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-321/
https://www.claycomix.com/posts/depression-comix-321/#commentsTue, 14 Mar 2017 23:49:36 +0000https://www.claycomix.com/?p=7415This is a strip I did back in August but I was never really happy with the art so I redid the panel. I think the sister reminded me too much like Melania Trump when I first drew the panel.

One thing I read about when people talk about suicide and depression is that how non-depressive people can’t understand how depressed people can’t understand that their deaths would have impact. The whole “suicide is selfish” reasoning is based on the idea that depressed people know that they are cared about and they know their deaths would hurt everyone around them. The reality, or at least for me, is that depressed people have lost this understanding. Many honestly don’t believe they are loved and that their departure would have any negative impact. They may even think it’s a good thing, that their deaths would actually help those around them. That’s why the “suicide is selfish” argument is wrong: selfish people hoard what they think is valuable; depressed people don’t believe that what they are taking away has any value.

This a reason why it should be treated as an illness. In many cases there is no rational reason to believe that one’s life is meaningless to those around them but when you’re sick, you cough, and you have as little control over that as you do thinking negatively when under depression’s influence.

I mentioned before that I like these two characters. A lot of depression comix is about unhealthy relationships, but it’s good to show how family support can help, because research shows that it does.